


Walking Wounded

by Ignaz Wisdom (ignaz)



Category: MASH
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-03
Updated: 2006-11-03
Packaged: 2017-10-01 23:46:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignaz/pseuds/Ignaz%20Wisdom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>There was heat between her legs -- dry heat, an arid desert.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walking Wounded

**Author's Note:**

> For Sitcomathon. Stoney321 requested Hotlips Houlihan/Charles Emerson Winchester III. The rest of it is entirely my fault. I wanted to write in this fandom, but I never expected that my first story would be this pairing. I also seem to have broken my funny-ometer, so apologies all around for that. All comments are welcome.

There was heat between her legs -- dry heat, an arid desert. Weeks came and weeks passed with nothing but dry heat. But she was no desert -- there was nothing empty or barren about her. Not this time.

Margaret Houlihan closed her eyes, bit her tongue, and turned to the only person she ever really could.

* * *

Already he was growing cold, laid out on the table in front of her. The once-warm blood stilled in his veins, no longer propelled by the once-beating heart. The name on the dog tags said Jim. His name had been Jim.

"You and Charles did everything you could," Hawkeye said from somewhere behind her. His hand fumbled awkwardly on her shoulder.

"It wasn't enough," she said.

"Nothing would have been enough," he said, and then she felt him at her back, looking over her shoulder at the body. At Jim's body. "The poor kid never stood a chance," he added softly.

"I haven't lost a patient in ... months," she guessed. One hand fluttered briefly and indecisively before falling to her side again.

"It's a war, Margaret," Hawkeye said. "It kills people. That's what war is for," and then she felt the heat of him at her back disappear, and she was alone in the operating room. Alone with Jim.

* * *

If there was only one thing in the world she loved -- and sometimes she thought that maybe there was -- it was the Army. She had tried to love other things as much as she loved her job. For a while, with Donald, she thought she'd even succeeded. But she'd only been kidding herself. The divorce proved that. And after the anger and the tears, she realized that the Army was her marriage, her family, her life, and that there was no shame in any of that.

Of course, sometimes she found herself longing for other things -- a marriage that worked, for instance. Maybe, someday down the road, a family of her own.

After all, Korea couldn't last forever.

* * *

She passed through the makeshift olive curtains and stepped outside, barely noticing Charles as he sat on the bench by the laundry hampers, still in his red stained scrubs. She walked straight through the camp in her own bloodied clothes, mask clutched tightly in one hand, studiously ignoring the guarded looks of the other nurses and staff.

In her tent, she removed her scrubs mechanically, rolled them into a tight ball, and pushed them under a chair where she wouldn't have to look at them. She would return them to the laundry later, when she felt she could step outside without screaming.

There was a muffled knock at her door.

"Who is it," she muttered, more challenge than question.

"Margaret," came the reply, far softer than she had expected, but still in that strange, strained way he had of pronouncing her name: Mah-gret, the way he said Hah-vard. "May I ..." He seemed to falter. "May I come in and have a word with you?"

She sighed. "Why bother asking? You're going to do it anyway, aren't you?"

After a moment's hesitation, the door opened and Charles entered the tent. "Margaret, if you had wished to be alone, I would most certainly have honored that request," he said, managing to sound both wounded and snide at the same time.

* * *

To Hawkeye's credit, he did not congratulate her, or even make any smart remarks. He was quiet and thoughtful. He saw her, read her, and recognized her. "We should tell Colonel Potter," he said.

"No. Nobody else can know."

"I -- Margaret," he answered, speaking to her like she was a child. "If you're saying what I think you're saying, eventually people are going to know."

She shook her head and gripped his forearm tightly. "No," she said. "Nobody is going to know."

* * *

Margaret squinted at him. He'd removed the scrubs, thank God -- if she had to look at any more blood (any more of Jim's blood) tonight she didn't know what she would have done. He had left the white cap on his head. In the dim light and in his wrinkled green Army-issue clothes he looked less like Charles Emerson Winchester the Third than she'd ever seen him. For a moment, Charles just looked like a soldier: a weary soldier in the wrong war.

Rage, sympathy, and something that might have been grief struggled for dominance inside her. "Well?" she prompted. "You wanted to have a word with me. Have at it."

He glanced around the dark little tent, shifting with obvious if uncharacteristic discomfort. He hovered like a fruit fly. Even Charles didn't seem to know why he was there.

Finally, he spoke. "I simply wanted to tell you that you did good work in there today."

She lifted her chin and felt her mouth tighten with anger. "'Good work'? What do you mean, I did 'good work'?"

Before her eyes, Charles seemed to bristle and straighten, growing almost imperceptibly taller. "I mean that you performed your duties quite skillfully and swiftly, and that it was a privilege to work with you."

She knew her voice was rising but she didn't care. "_Skillfully?_ Are you out of your mind?"

"Margaret, you are being completely unreasonable! I am trying to pay you a compliment!"

Nearly blinded with fury, she stepped forward. "You're paying me a compliment? You're paying me a _compliment?_" She pointed wildly in the direction of the OR. "A boy _died_ in there today!"

"I know a boy died!" Charles shouted back. "I was there! I had his blood all over me!" He yanked emphatically at the front of his shirt.

"Oh, you got his blood on you!" she snarled, reaching forward to tug at the same place on his shirt. "Poor, poor you!"

"Margaret, what on earth is the matter with you?" he yelled.

"What do you care, Charles? What do you care if one of those kids dies? The only thing you care about is -- is yourself! All you care about is whether being in Korea is going to turn you into a lousy surgeon, or cost you some stupid hospital job back in Boston, or make you miss out on some stuffy soirée in Tokyo with a bunch of rich jerks who couldn't give a damn about the men getting killed out here!"

She wished immediately that she hadn't said a word of it.

"Margaret," he said very quietly, "that's not true."

"I know," she rasped. "I know it's not true," and then it was the easiest thing in the world to just step forward and wrap her arms around him, and to feel his arms curve cautiously around her. He smelled vaguely of sweat and some kind of expensive cologne.

* * *

Charles was the last person in the world she could imagine herself ending up with. He was pompous, arrogant, conceited, withdrawn -- and there was no possible way that he would ever commit to someone like her. No, Charles was destined to return to Boston, covered in medals, to wed some heiress whose great-great-great-grandparents had been rolling in money, and he damn well knew it. Margaret, the little spitfire Korean girl he used to go around with -- they were just temporary distractions.

And she damn well knew it, too.

* * *

"Of course I would rather be in Boston than here," he said, his nose buried in her hair. "Everyone would rather be at home. But that does not mean that I don't care about helping these men. I care very much about them. And I care about you, Margaret." He shifted, turning her so that they were face to face. "You did everything that anyone could have possibly done to save that soldier. He could not have had a better nurse in the entire world."

Her throat constricted and she was suddenly choking, drowning in saltwater. Shaking, she clung to him, recognizing for the first time that her anger, her grief, and her helplessness were all echoed in him.

For a moment, they embraced as soldiers, the walking wounded of a never ending battle. But then something changed -- a twist of bodies, a flicker of light -- and all at once it was just like the time all those months and months earlier, when she and Hawkeye had been caught in a shelled out cottage under endless enemy fire with nothing to hold on to but each other. But now it was a thousand times more dangerous, because now she and Charles were in her tent, and there was her little bed, and she was damned if she had the power to stop this thing before it spiraled out of control.

* * *

"I don't know how to do this. This isn't exactly something they teach in med school, Margaret."

She gritted her teeth for the hundredth time that evening. "You do know how. It can't be that difficult."

Hawkeye was pacing the tiny floor of her tent, his face intent, fluctuating between fear and determination. "I've never ... I've never even seen ... except for one time, in the hospital I used to work at before they shipped me here." He stopped walking, some distance away, and turned to look at her. "Margaret, what are we going to do if I screw this up?"

She crossed the space separating them, and took both of his hands -- his skilled, worn, familiar hands -- in her own.

"You won't," she promised.

* * *

There was something like trepidation in his lovemaking, like his breeding and his refinement were fighting with his passion, with no idea which would win. Charles made love like a Winchester: withdrawn. He wanted to love her, he did -- she could tell when men wanted to love her -- but there was something holding him back. It wasn't his fault. It really wasn't his fault.

* * *

There was heat, and warm, welcome blood, and Hawkeye's anxious face peering at her.

"Margaret?" he asked softly, breaking her woozy reverie. "How are you feeling?"

She was feeling. Oh, how she was feeling. It was bitter and sweet. Grief, she felt. Anger. Relief and release. Gratitude, too, and the calm understanding that _not now_ didn't have to mean _never_. Korea, after all, would someday recede from her life and be nothing more than a distant memory.

"I'm fine," she said. "I'm fine," and as she whispered it a second time she realized that it was true.


End file.
